Donald Trump clarified Monday morning that he was only referring to armed guards and security personnel when he said more people should have been armed at the Orlando, Fla., nightclub where 49 people were killed in a shooting.
“When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees,” the presumptive Republican presidential candidate tweeted early Monday morning.
When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2016
Since the Orlando mass shooting last week, Trump has repeatedly said that the outcome would have been different had more people inside Pulse nightclub had guns. In the shooting, 49 people were killed and 53 others injured in the Orlando nightclub, before the shooter, Omar Mateen, was killed by police.
“If people in that room had guns, with the bullets flying in the opposite direction right at him, right at his head, you wouldn’t have had the same tragedy that you ended up having,” Trump told CNN last week.
Trump’s prior comments seemed to indicate he wanted clubgoers themselves to be armed.
“If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here, right to their waist or right to their ankle, and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes ‘boom, boom,’ you know, that would have been a beautiful sight folks,” Trump said on Friday night.
However, the National Rifle Association threw cold water on that idea.
“No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms. That defies commonsense. It also defies the law. It’s not what we’re talking about here,” Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.
